The invention relates to decision-making, and more particularly, to systems and methods of negotiation support.
Electronic negotiations (e-negotiations) are becoming an important research subject in the area of electronic commerce (e-commerce). The Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC) laboratory of MIT, for instance, puts e-negotiations at the center of its Consumer Buying Behavior (CBB) model for e-commerce. The model identifies six steps in an e-commerce transaction, identification of the need, product brokering, merchant brokering, negotiation, purchase and delivery and service evaluation. Auctions are at present the most visible type of e-negotiations on the Internet as conducted by eBay. Application of e-negotiations is not limited to e-commerce but also exists in various decision support systems.
E-negotiations can take a complex form called bargaining. It involves making proposals and counter-proposals until an agreement is reached. Bargaining can be bilateral and multi-lateral negotiation depending on whether there are two parties (one-to-one bargaining) or many parties (many-to-many bargaining) involved in the negotiation. Negotiations are further classified as distributive or integrative. In distributive negotiations, only one issue (e.g. price) is negotiable. The parties have opposing interests. One party (e.g. buyer) tries to minimize and the other party (e.g. seller) tries to maximize the price. In integrative negotiations, multiple issues (e.g. price, quality, delivery date or others) are negotiable. If all issues are negotiable then a customer may hope to get a cheap price if she can live with a poorer quality and/or can stand a long delivery time. In this case, parties do not necessarily have opposing interests since they try to optimize different issues. Integrative negotiation, however, is time-consuming and difficult to achieve optimize satisfactions among parties.